Whose Names Are Unknown

Sanora Babb

3 ideas

1. The Dunnes Leave the Panhandle Dugout

   Milt and Julia Dunne, their daughters Myra and Lonnie, and Milt's father Konkie farm wheat from a dugout in the Oklahoma panhandle while drought and dust storms destroy crop after crop. Julia's diary records how they ration food, lose their animals, and watch neighbors give up. They finally go to California, where they become field workers moving between crops for wages that do not cover food, living in camps and ditch-bank shacks.

2. Measuring Disaster Through Women's Domestic Arithmetic

   Viewing economic collapse from the kitchen and the diary shows costs that crop yields and wage rates miss. That daily rationing, done mostly by women and largely invisible, is where scarcity actually lands on bodies.

3. Anonymity as a Tool of Labor Control

   The title comes from legal boilerplate that names unidentified people, here the migrant workers the system treats as nameless. Growers need workers who are interchangeable and have no local standing.

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